Struggling Barnes & Noble fires some of its Nook engineering staff

B&N desperately needs to retool if it wants a chance at catching Amazon, Apple.

It looks there’s another nail in the coffin of the not-quite-dead-yet Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader.

Mary Ellen Keating, a company spokesperson, told Ars by e-mail that while earlier reports of the firing of the entire Nook hardware team were incorrect, there were indeed some “job eliminations across the organization." Keating declined to give any more specifics. Last month, three top B&N Nook executives also left the company.

In her e-mail, Keating added:

We believe we have a strong management team in place at Nook, having recruited significant new talent. The new Nook management team is focused on managing the business efficiently so that it becomes financially strong while at the same time aggressively moving to drive revenue growth.

In January 2014, Barnes & Noble also announced that “device and accessories sales” plummeted to $88.7 million during the October through December 2013 holiday period, a drop of 66.7 percent. The company attributed the loss to “lower unit selling volume and lower average selling prices.” Of course, that was prime shopping season, when most retailers see a spike in sales. The company added that “digital content sales” were $36.5 million during the same time frame, a drop of 27.3 percent.